Upload permission for Romain Francoise for 'emacs-snapshot'

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 05:29:07PM +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> I think we should ask the MOTU Council and Tech Board to comment, and
> see what sort of guidelines they would like to establish for someone who
> is clearly technically competent (a DD and/or an upstream in the
> relevant package) to participate in a specific package in Ubuntu.

In general, I'm much more comfortable with these arrangements when the
person involved is an active member of the Ubuntu developer community.  This
provides them with a support structure for their work, and clear
responsibilities.

I'm open to being fairly liberal with Debian developers who are not directly
involved in Ubuntu, as they already implicitly have a great deal of direct
influence on their packages in Ubuntu.  However, this does open something of
a can of worms in terms of governance.  To whom are they accountable within
Ubuntu?  What relationship are they expected to have with MOTUs?  What team
are they a member of?  These are questions I think we can resolve through
discussion within the Ubuntu development community.

I'm much less sure about upstream participation, where the questions get
harder.

If we grant upload privileges to people who are not Ubuntu developers at
all, what are they expected to do with them?  If they're interested in
working on packaging their own software, I think that's great, and we should
seek to accomodate them in the packaging stage (Debian and Ubuntu), by
learning the necessary skills and practices to be good packagers.

If you're hoping that they'll come and do upstream development in Ubuntu, I
think that's a very different proposition and one which I would approach
more carefully.

Ubuntu has been built as a sort of "second-order" distribution, where the
raw materials we work with are primarily Debian packages, rather than
upstream tarballs.

In other words, Ubuntu is effectively a later stage in the pipeline.  If we
start mixing models and behaviours from different pipeline stages, I think
things get complicated very quickly.  There are good reasons why complex
things are built in stages, with specilaized facilities and personnel at
each stage (design, manufacturing, assembly, etc.).

-- 
 - mdz